Ah, I see. I know it sounds a little odd when we can get sites built for $600 these days, but I've gone that road before and it's awful. I can't stand ugly sites and ugly code- I'm willing to pay extra for people to write unit tests and make things readable/scalable. Guess I'm picky that way. If I'm going to make a contribution, it's going to be excellent.

Do we need another exchange service or should I find another way to help? Any suggestions?

I have a tangential question. Operating an exchange requires a pretty high level of trust from the traders. After all, the traders are giving the exchange their money up front, and trusting that the exchange operator won't just close down and abscond with the money.

How does a new exchange operator prove their trustworthiness? I am not in any way suggesting that you have any nefarious intentions, I'm just wondering how you will be able to gain people's trust.

Trust needs to grow. Someone who has a good reputation on the forum is more likely to be trusted, then someone who is just joined the market. But still, don't keep to much money on the exchange. Even someone trustworthy can become less reliable and the exchanges here are not registered financial institutions (no protection if an exchange just stops and the owner disappears).

There's even profit in the "aggregation" of exchangers... It always puzzled me why there's no known attempt to do that, as it would be fairly easy to have, say, bitcoinusa have a few bucks on mtgox and then offer theirs bids and asks at a slight markup, making the buy/sell on customer request. Hmm, how about an external proxy doing that on multiple exchangers?

I am currently attempting to do just this.

There are two large problems I am facing:

Getting USD into the exchanges. Due to the transaction costs, it might not be worth it to do this form of trading. Also, it is impossible to transfer USD between exchanges.

Confirmation time makes it risky to do a BTC transfer between exchanges as price could change before your money gets there.

Solutions I see to these and other issues surround the Bitcoin markets:

Exchanges need to allow 'day trader' activity in the form of instant transactions. If the pace of the Bitcoin exchanges picks up, 50 minutes of price changes could kill your position if you're trading with most of the money in your account and have to wait for a confirmed block to get your coins back.

We need a common trading size on the exchange -- maybe 10 BTC -- so that more trades can go through in a standard way (similar to common stocks trading in 100 share blocks most often).

Margin trading accounts that give around 4:1 leverage on larger accounts. Proper precaution would be taken on the part of the exchange / broker that all transactions must settle before finds may be withdrawn.

The use-case for what I was thinking here was "no stored value". I was thinking of a system where people can keep their anonymity but still be able to trade in a secure way. The exchange would take place like this:

Buyer submits a ticket to buy 500 BTC with 400 USD at a price of $0.80 each, to execute within 30 days.

Buyer pays $400 immediately with PayPal. If the ticket expires or is canceled, the money is refunded.

Seller submits a ticket to sell 500 BTC for 400 USD at a price of $0.80 each, to execute within 30 days.

Seller transfers the coins into a temporary wallet before the ticket goes live. If the ticket expires or is canceled, the money is refunded.

The system connects the two orders and resolves the payments (wallet->wallet, Paypal->Paypal).

Good point. That automatically ads 3% to the transaction cost from the exchange side. I think payments would still be free to the exchange since technically we'd be buying the bitcoins on someone's behalf. That incremental 2-3% comes from the buyer and is their choice WRT the method of payment.

I imagine I'd want to work with alternative payment processing groups, checks, or ACH.